User experience design
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Overview
User experience is a tricky term as it can be used both broadly and narrowly:
- Some use UX to refer to the entire design process which focuses on improving the user experience.
- Others use UX to refer to user research and/or usability testing, and/or the interaction design aspects of the interface.
IA is one part of the design process and so it's often folded under the UX umbrella.
Even though it's only one part among a number of other pieces such as design research, usability testing, interface and interaction design, IA is the foundation for good design.
Information Architects work to create usable content structures out of complex sets of information. They do this using plenty of user-centered design methods: usability tests, persona research and creation, and user flow diagrams (to name only a few). [...] UX builds on the foundation that IA provides, aiming to take that experience to the next level, both creatively and emotionally.
IA forms a skeleton of any design project. Visual elements, functionality, interaction, and navigation are built according to the information architecture principles. The thing is that even compelling content elements and powerful UI design can fail without appropriate IA. Unorganized content makes navigation difficult and inexplicit, so the users can easily get lost and feel annoyed. If the users face first bad interaction, they may not give the second chance to your product.
How this affects IA
The ambiguity of the term UX can create problems for IA in the following ways:
- An organization/project might bring in a UX person or a team full of UX professionals to work on a design project assuming that IA is be part of the expertise set when it isn’t
- The popularity of UX as a term can cause decision-makers to forget that IA is an essential part of the design process
Additionally, UX testing can unintentionally introduce bias, which could affect the recommendations made to the site IA or content IA.
The items included in card sort studies affect results. Avoid bias by choosing items that proportionately represent your offerings.
Writing tasks for a usability test is not easy. As any experienced usability researcher can tell you, how the task is written directly impacts the success of the study. If you give study participants bad instructions, you can bias them and completely change the outcome of the study. At best, you won’t learn that much, and the study won’t reflect real-world use very well. At worst, your “findings” will be directly misleading and cause you to make the product worse, rather than better.
The false-consensus effect refers to people’s tendency to assume that others share their beliefs and will behave similarly in a given context. This assumption can lead UX professionals to make the wrong design decisions. Acknowledge your vulnerability and establish checks.
Designers are vulnerable to the same cognitive biases as users. The context in which you present a problem can bias your design choices.
Take aways
- When specific disciplines and expertise like IA, become absorbed by ambiguous terms like UX, digital projects are in danger of building on shaky ground, without proper structure and lasting foundation.
- Without creating separate space for IA in conversations, staffing and workflows, a UX project might collect all the right research, ideate possible solutions and even test them with card sorting, but fail to consider perspectives and principles that connect disparate systems of information in meaningful ways.
- It's not enough to just identify the language of your users through research and card sorting and then build a system out of it. In order to create a coherent system, an information architect needs to analyze this data and make labelling and structural choices and decisions that reflect the content of the whole system (something a user is never able to see, as they are only given a small glimpse into its contents).
- Users should have a voice, but you cannot build coherent systems based on a narrow view of a problem by a user.
- You need perspective which should be applied through IA.
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